Expanding Pearl River Delta region will strain environment
Su Liu says the vision of a mega urban cluster demands resources the region does not have
Growing integration is turning cities in the Pearl River Delta region into a mega urban cluster of a projected 100 million people. Hong Kong and Macau will one day be linked with the new special zones of Hengqin (Zhuhai), Qianhai (Shenzhen) and Nansha (Guangzhou) in a densely populated corridor - each area with its own political, social and legal systems.
How well will this hybrid model function? It may just be too big to be healthy.
As a powerhouse of the Chinese economy, the Pearl River Delta (minus Hong Kong and Macau) encompasses only 0.5 per cent of the nation's land area and only 4 per cent of the mainland population, according to the mainland's 2010 census. It accounted for 9.4 per cent of gross domestic product, 27.3 per cent of total exports, and 17.3 per cent of utilised foreign capital.
Although the region's contribution to the mainland economy has decreased in recent years, it still holds a significant position in the overall development of China.
To enhance the region's competitiveness, Beijing has gone all out to support Guangdong's initiative to create special zones and called for the participation of Hong Kong and Macau to speed up integrated development.
But megacities can be monsters that gobble up resources. In the past 30 years or so, such a monster has been growing in the region, which has been forced to feed ever more mouths (7.3 times the country's average population density) with meagre resources ( only 1 per cent of China's water and using 8 per cent of its energy consumption).
